Chapter 4
4
By the time I board the train at half past five, it’s pitch-black outside. It’s typically dark by four thirty this time of year, which is one of the worst things about living in the Midwest. I dread daylight savings every year. “Fall back” feels like a personal attack on anyone with even a mild touch of seasonal affective disorder. Whenever I got the winter blues and asked my father why the hell he’d settled our family in one of the coldest regions of the country, he’d always grin and say, Because Florida has alligators .
“Merry Christmas!”
A disheveled woman steps onto the train, jingling a red bucket. Everyone on the train collectively shifts in their seats, averting their eyes. This time of year, Chicago’s homeless population embarks on the CTA more often than usual, escaping the cold and hoping for generosity from commuters in a holiday mood.
Determined not to be ignored, the woman shakes her bucket again. The sparse coins within rattle, and a harsh metallic sound echoes through the train car, making me wince. The bucket woman looks around, eyes wet and beady, hoping at least a few of the sluggish evening commuters crowding the train car will toss some money her way.
“Come on, come on, s’almost Christmas,” rasps the panhandling woman. “Christmas! Remember Christmas? I’m talking about Christmas...”
Feeling guilty, I dig around in my pocket. I try to be subtle about it, not wanting to call attention to this action. I almost never have cash, and don’t want to get the woman’s hopes up.
When my fingers close around a stray quarter at the bottom of my pocket, I hesitate. Giving just a quarter seems shitty. Plus, my apartment building has coin-op laundry, and I need six quarters to run the washer and another six for a dryer cycle. Twelve quarters for every single load of laundry. Sasha jokingly calls me a quarter hoarder. I’d honestly rather give this woman a ten-dollar bill, but I don’t have any paper money. Only one lonely coin.
My quarter lands with a dull clunk in the bucket.
The woman looks up at me. Her skin is leathery, and her small blue-black eyes bore into my own. Patchy gray hair pokes out from under her black knit cap, and a few wiry strands twist up from her chin. She’s wearing several layers of ratty clothing, but no actual winter coat. I look down, trying to avoid her penetrating gaze. Her shoes are worn through at the toes, and the sight of her stocking feet poking through them sends shame coursing through me.
“Look up,” she says.
Her voice sounds different. Accented. Unexpectedly familiar. It’s hard to tell in just two syllables. But her words are a command I cannot ignore. I look up, and startle.
The old woman’s face is no longer her own.
Her eyes have shifted from cobalt to the steely shade of an overcast day. Her puckered lips look thinner, primmer. She holds her head more erect, looking at me with a firm, tender regard. My vision blurs and I choke back a strangled cry, because all of a sudden the old woman isn’t some random panhandler.
She’s my grandmother.
“Bubbe?” I gasp.
She nods, ever so slightly. Her eyes meet mine and they’re all I see. Everything else fades away, watercolor and shadow, insubstantial, gone. My grandmother’s gaze is familiar and determined. She has something to say and she wants to make sure I hear it.
“Make...” she says, so soft that only I can hear her.
“Make what?” I whisper, terrified.
“Make—”
The train lists sharply around a curve in the track, and I stumble backward, head dropping toward my chest as I fumble for my footing. When I look up again, my grandmother is gone. There is only the wary panhandler, staring at me with unfamiliar eyes, blue-black and watery. A stranger.
“Nothing, nothing, nothing,” she mutters, looking briefly into the bucket before snapping her head back up toward me, disgruntled. “That’s all you got?”
Her hard glare makes me flinch, but I’m still so struck by what’s just happened that I don’t look away from her.
“Bubbe?” I whisper again, trembling.
“I know you got more on you,” says the woman, who doesn’t seem to hear me at all.
“Sorry,” I say, taking a step back, the spell fully broken. Or maybe nothing had happened at all, and I imagined the whole thing.
I haven’t been sleeping well, and my mind has had a tendency to drift this past year. Could I have possibly nodded off while standing there on the train? Maybe. My heart is still hammering away in my chest, telling me that something is wrong, but honestly—everything feels wrong, all the time. So it’s hard to trust my gut these days.
“You got more,” demands the woman.
“I don’t have any cash,” I mumble, still reeling. “Not on me.”
“Yeah, right. Where’s your Christian spirit?”
Well, that officially confirms that this old woman isn’t my grandmother.
“I said, where’s your Christian spirit, asshole?” she repeats, louder.
It must be a line she uses a lot. I bet it works on some people. I bite my tongue, because saying actually, I’m Jewish , would confirm: yep, I’m an asshole . Or worse, it might make all Jewish people sound like assholes, thanks to the constant representative responsibility all minorities carry. When I instead say nothing, she shakes her head, disgusted.
“You got plenty more. I can tell.”
I want to insist that I really don’t have any more, not on me. If I had more, I’d give it to her—honest to God, I would. Even though she’s nothing like my grandmother, she might be someone’s grandmother—and even if she has no family, she’s still a person. Still worth something. There’s a very real part of me that wants to tell her that. A part of me that knows she’s only yelling and cursing because she’s tired, hungry, not getting the mental and physical healthcare she deserves. I want to tell her that I know that, and feel awful about it.
You are worth something. I’m sorry your life is hard. I know how it feels to be invisible. I know how it feels to be lonely. I’m sorry I don’t have any cash. I have credit cards, though. Come with me and I’ll buy you dinner.
That’s what my father would have done. He was always helping people out, doing the right thing even when it wasn’t the easy thing. For a slim half second, I think that maybe I, too, can do hard things.
But the panhandling woman is already pulling open the door that connects our train car to the adjacent one, rattling her bucket for a new audience. A cutting breeze rushes into the car. I hear the old woman call “Who’s a giver here?” as the door slides shut behind her. She’s gone.
Everyone’s gone , I think.
Then my stomach gurgles another loud request for food. A request I’ll be able to fill, over and over, while others go hungry. The thought makes me hate myself. I put my hand over my middle, ashamed of my hunger, my stasis, my utter inability to do anything that might actually make a difference. This season doesn’t feel merry or bright.
It just feels cold.